A White Supremacist/Alt-Right Conference In DC Climaxed In A ‘Heil Victory’ Trump Salute, And Tila Tequila Was In Attendance

A few hundred white supremacists and alt-right believers met in Washington, D.C. over the weekend. Their mission? To celebrate Donald Trump’s ascendance to the highest office in the land. Naturally, MySpace sweetheart and noted anti-Semite Tila Tequila was in attendance. The former Shot of Love and Surviving Nugent star posted the above photo of a “heil victory!” salute with fellow members. Her enthusiasm earned a retweet from Jake Tapper, whose fingers only reported the facts (but one can easily envision the face he was probably making while typing).

The New York Times has the inside details of the “restless” crowd, who was ready to let loose after 11 hours of speeches that urged the crowd of 200 to “act more like the establishment” and not-so underground. At the end, alt-right leader Richard B. Spencer switched courses:

[N]ow his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute.When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.

The rest of the piece discusses Spencer’s attempt to quell unsavory sentiments while celebrating Trump’s victory, but inevitably, the white-supremacist sentiments kept seeped out. Spencer’s final speech accused the media of favoring Jewish interests while trying to beat Trump down, and his audience had already prepared the requisite Nazi-era vocab:

Mr. Spencer’s after-dinner speech began with a polemic against the “mainstream media,” before he briefly paused. “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” he said.

“One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem,” he said, referring to a Jewish fable about the golem, a clay giant that a rabbi brings to life to protect the Jews.

The Trump transition team hasn’t acknowledged this conference, but these supporters will be hard to shake off. The NY Timescalls out how Trump “built a campaign around the issues that mattered most to them.” He’s still the guy who fed the alt-right and their love of conspiracy theories during wild rallies. However, Trump’s campaign was mortified at the rabid fandom flowing from the KKK, which formally endorsed him in their “newspaper.” This was one of only a few newspaper endorsements that he received, yet Trump still won the presidency. Then, he chose Steve Bannon, whose Breitbart publication caters to anti-Semitic viewpoints, as his chief strategist.

Serious question: why do we separate the ‘alt-right’, whatever the fuck that means, from the rest of the white supremacists? They are cut from the same cloth, and being able to run a twitter account doesn’t change that.

I’ll bite. As a conservative, I can wholeheartedly say that these people are assholes. I’m glad though that I live in a country where idiots like this can out themselves for being assholes because if you somehow ban these groups, it will take me a bit longer to figure out they are assholes.

I’m not going to get into a debate about which group of people are worse. I will tell you that I am friends with many people who are republican and democrats, hard working, good people who voted for Trump, and they are as horrified about this kind of crap as I am. They don’t represent me and how I view this country or conservatism in any way shape or form.

But when you vote for someone who represents all this, its on you. Anyone who voted for trump and is NOW “horrified” is beyond ignorant. If you didnt know this was going to happen before he won I feel bad for you. The writing was on the wall.

@Charles Bronson Feel bad all you like. There are always fringe groups that co-opt whatever they can to put forth their own agenda. Here are 200 assholes (according to a report) in a country of 300 million people. You think they magically appeared out of nowhere because of Trump? No, they’ve been here, and their ilk have been been here, for hundreds of years. There’s bad people of all races, political persuasions, genders, etc., etc., etc. But, the media uses these groups because they can try and pigeonhole all 60 million people who voted for Trump as “racists”. I know African Americans who voted for Trump too. Are they racists?

These people used to hide in the shadows, now they openly and brazenly display their Nazi beliefs. It’s worth asking the question, what has changed? Why are they so emboldened now? And what are the consequences of this?
Is it just a mere coincidence that this coincides with the election of Donald Trump, a man whose campaign was rooted in appeals to white nationalism? Who appointed a darling of the Alt-Right as his Chief Strategist? Whose campaign on multiple occasions tweeted images that originated on white supremacist websites? Pretty crazy coincidence if so. Every side has extremists, the problem lies when your party’s leader carefully crafts his messages and words to specifically appeal to these extremists.

@ak3647 They hid in the shadows? How many KKK rallies have their been in the last 8 years? Christ, one nut job in New Jersey even named his kid Adolph Hitler.

We can disagree about a lot of things, reasonably, and trust me, I wasn’t wearing a Trump hat or put a sign in my yard even though I am an appointed official in my county’s Republican party. All I am saying is that we can lump one another into a big pool of crap because of our beliefs (like HRC did with the deplorable crack) or we can try and find common ground. And the most wonderful thing in the world is that there’s a Constitution that protects us from whackjobs and wingnuts from doing whatever they damn well please.

When the time came, and push came to shove, you ignored the experts, conservative and liberal alike that warned you that Trump’s message resonated with these people on a level never before seen in in modern politics. They warned that Steve Bannon was at the very least sympathetic to this viewpoint. And yet, when push came you put your name on the line to say “I’m willing to risk giving the extremists a voice in the White House.” That’s something you’re going to have to reconcile within yourself. I’m getting awfully tired of Republicans try to distance themselves from Trump’s white nationalist tendencies and asking the rest of us to overlook them. You helped encourage this when you cast your vote for the man.

@DarthBile Yes there were “open” white supremacists before Trump won. But they were always small in numbers. By all accounts, the KKK has just a few thousand active, “open” members. The KKK and “skinhead” neo-Nazis covered in swastika tattoos were always just a tiny, vocal subset of the larger white supremacist movement. There were always millions of white people who shared white supremacist beliefs, but were very careful to keep their true racist feelings a secret. They shared racist jokes and comments carefully via email or text or among their like-minded white friends, always careful to not publicly do so lest they expose themselves. But now, increasingly, these people who would so casually call black people “n*ggers” in private are now publicly willing to do so. Now these people who would only trade memes comparing Michelle Obama to an ape privately among select friends are now willing to post them to their facebook pages for all to see. Racist white people are now increasingly finding it socially acceptable to be openly and publicly racist. Look at the white people in the photo. Do you see shaved heads and racist tattoos? No, these vile racists wear suits and look like businessmen. White supremacists don’t don hoods and burn crosses anymore, they create racist memes and fake news and share them on like-minded websites and forums and through social media. And now their organizing is becoming even more complex. They would only be openly vocal like this if they truly believe they now have sympathetic ears in Washington. And they’re not wrong. Trump is going to appoint an avowed Southern white racist as Attorney General. They DO have sympathetic ears at the highest levels of power now. So of course they’re going to be emboldened. What remains to be seen is if this translates to some 1930’s style German Brownshirt shit. If these fucks are going to firebombing mosques and pulling hijabs off of women and committing other forms of violence. Spikes in the reports of hate crimes after Trump’s victory suggest this isn’t just idle speculation.

Some Trump supporters actually convinced themselves that this was all liberal media spin (including his pussy grabbing). Got this straight from the southern mother-in-law (who pretends to not be racist) mouth.

@ak3647 With all due respect to you, I’m a conservative businessman and I know thousands of businessmen and women, bankers, politicians, etc., and all the stuff you are alleging that these people do is news to me. There’s only one topic that comes up over and over and it’s the economy. None of what you say happens or think happens goes on in these circles. Now, am I the arbiter of one’s heart and can divine what their beliefs are? Of course not. I’m I getting all of my news from some asshole SubReddit site? Of course not. But dude, you think we are going to start burning crosses in someone’s yard because we are Republicans, it isn’t happening. Not around me at least.

Not to go off on a tangent, but the reason I didn’t vote for HRC (I voted for Bill Clinton twice, FYI) is because I’ve run a business for the past 7 years and I know what President Obama’s policies have done to it. You can quote whatever HuffPo article on how great the economy is, but it’s nonsense (Wall Street isn’t Main Street America). I know HRC was not going to do anything radically different to improve the economy except maybe double-down on them. So let me throw this out at you, and maybe you’ll understand and maybe you won’t, I don’t know…but maybe a goodly percentage of those 60 million people were hoping for a better economy and better wages to help make their lives a little better? Instead of condemning them as racists, maybe give them the benefit of the doubt that they knew they weren’t succeeding under Obama and they didn’t think that HRC was offering anything better. Could they be wrong? ABSOLUTELY. But when you’ve lost your job and running your debt up to help pay for your basic needs and you see no hope and you don’t qualify for benefit programs, how do you throw these people in some broad brush stroke of “racism”?

@DarthBile: ok…wait…you voted for Trump because of his business acumen?
And those white working class folks that voted for Drumpf are stupid and were conned. There’s no way this asshole (and congress) is going to help them. If anything, their going to be even worse off.

@DarthBile setting aside the fact that most poor people voted for Clinton, I believe you that bulk of Trump’s support were from people who were unhappy with their current economic situation. I don’t think most people who voted for Trump are racist. But they did signal to the world that his extremist views are okay with in them in exchange for a vague, likely impossible, promise of a sightly better economic situation.

@Buckaroo B That’s you speculating, and it’s your right to do so. But what they knew was 1) how they were doing the last 8 years of Obama and 2) that HRC didn’t really offer anything in the way of rebuilding the middle class.

I’m telling you my friend, take this for what you will: I was a poll watcher for my little ward. There are over 2,500 registered democratic voters compared to 800 republican voters (I know the approximate count because I ran for a township office and got my ass handed to me by a democrat in the general). At the end of the night, Trump was +140 votes. Do you think that only white republicans voted for him? Not likely. Those people (mostly white and Hispanic by demographics) came out for Trump.

Is it all racism or sexism that they voted this way, or because they hoped for change?

@The Evil Twin @DarthBile I guess I just want a Republican who voted for Trump to explain to me where the line is. You say you voted for him in spite of the fact that he said terrible things because he promised you a better job. How much are you willing to overlook if it means you, personally, get a better deal. If “I want a Muslim registry” isn’t too far, what is? If Trump’s promise to somehow force manufacturers to stop using robots allows you to overlook retweeting White Supremacists and saying that 5 black kids who have be exonerated by forensic science should be put to death because Trump “believes” they’re guilty, where is the line?

For those of us (on both the left and right) that decided Trump was completely unfit to lead, we cannot reconcile how supposedly good people overlook awful things in the name of self interest.

It’s not about agree/disagree. It’s about standing up to dangerous behavior and combatting its normalization. You don’t get to say, “I only voted for Pol Pot because of his infrastructure policy. I wasn’t for the whole Killing Fields thing.” If you voted for him (yeah, I know Pol Pot wasn’t elected, but I didn’t want to Godwin this thread), you voted for the whole package and those who did now own it. I don’t think that everyone who voted for Trump is racist, but I think Trump is #1 with racists — that should at the very least give his non-racist supporters significant pause and, I hope, make them vigilant about his policies in that regard going forward. If not, then they should cop to the fact that that they’re willing to swallow their values re: subjugation of their fellow Americans in return for lower taxes on the wealthy.

@DarthBile:
But Bill Clinton delivered…remember that surplus?
I hear what you’re saying. But, even if they were ignoring the blatant misogyny and overt racism (which is pretty narcissistic) they voted against they’re interests. Trump is not bringing manufacturing jobs back.

@ColeND28 I think because we probably have our news curated from different sources, you and I are going to hear points of view differently. I didn’t hear any overtly racist comments made by Trump. Because I visit Uproxx and a couple of other sites that are decidedly liberal, I hear edited sound bytes and read edited comments that aren’t the entirety of the story. I also realize that Trump is a 70 year old guy who isn’t a studied politician who speaks off the cuff and says some dumb things.

I’ve heard Trump is racist toward Mexicans from the Uproxx crowd. What I heard from Trump’s mouth is that a wall (or border fence) will help stem the tide of illegal immigrants from the country, some of which are criminals who commit violent acts and bring drugs across the border. Firstly, I don’t know of any industrialized country that has an open border policy. When your taxes keep going up and up (and told you aren’t paying enough) and you realize that we have 30 million immigrants that the Federal and State Governments are giving billions of benefits too, would you agree that it could upset a person? Is it racist to not want to give any portion of your wages to a person who isn’t even an American citizen? Secondly, one of my company’s interests are providing drug and alcohol treatment to people. You want to take a guess how much heroin is pouring in from Mexico? Go look it up. How many people have you known, heard about, or read about have died because of heroin overdoses. Now, I’m fair-minded and I know that a lot of these people who are dying from opiate abuse initially were legally prescribed opioids from physicians (and I know that Big Pharma is also culpable), but do you think that if you had a defended border wall, that maybe, just maybe that would prevent some of the heroin coming into the country. The DEA has stated that in the NY/PHL metro area, the purity of heroin is ridiculously high and that it’s coming from Mexico. More people die from drug overdoses than from gun violence each year, but we only hear about banning guns but nothing about the drug epidemic. Quite the contrary, there’s a push to legalize drugs. That’s a debate for another day, but it’s happening.

Regarding the Muslim Registry bit. I’m not going to ask you your philosophy, but a general question: do you think it unreasonable before admitting someone into this country for the purpose of legalizing them as a citizen to be aware of their background prior to doing so? If you answer is “no, it’s not reasonable” the follow up is “why do you think there is even an Immigration and Naturalization Service in the US?” If you think it reasonable, then maybe you could forgive Trump for not knowing the terminology involved with the legal immigration policy in the US by calling for a registry, when in fact there is such a database that exists that is associated for ALL immigrants coming into the US, not just Muslims.

The other issue, Cole, and I’m not trying to be “that guy” that dismisses everything because I understand that words matter, but whoever these old guys that are trying to use social media? How many stupid things have you forwarded or retweeted or something that turned out to be fabricated? I don’t do it much anymore (because I hate Twitter first and foremost and don’t know why these older people are trying to break into this platform because they end up screwing up more times than not) but I fell for some fake stories (some coming right from UPROXX) that I sent to other people. The fact that it’s linked back to some shitty group of assholes doesn’t mean I support that idiots anymore than I support Nazis, Communists, or any other ideology that is hate-centric.

@DarthBile I’d be curious to hear what specific policies of Obama have harmed your business. I’d also be curious why you seem to think it was economic interests that overwhelmingly drove people in their voting even though the unemployment rate is <5%, the stock market is at a record high, the economy has seen several quarters of sustained growth, and wages have been going up? You seem to just summarily dismiss all the overwhelmingly positive economic indicators out of hand, as if 50 million unemployed people just voted for Trump to bring them jobs. And if that's the case, the people are looking for a "change" in the economy, then why did Trump spend so much time talking about Muslims and Mexicans? What economic advantage does "banning Muslims" have? How does that appeal to out of work blue collar types in Ohio? Why do you think Trump is going to be good for our economy when the experts say his tax plan and spending plan will explode our deficit?

It’s great that you say they are assholes and don’t represent conservatives, but Bannon was named chief strategist and also is an advocate for the Alt-R, and they just openly admitted to being white supremacists. They may not represent conservatives in your brain, but Trump is openly telling us that they do in his.

@Buckaroo B I remember the surplus and I remember the economy tumbling right into the tank the last few months in his office. I remember that because that’s when I was going into the job market at the time. I’m not saying Bush was perfect (from from it), but no other President, at least since FDR, had to deal with as big of crisis as Bush did in 2001.

@JimmyJack There are racists on both sides of the political spectrum. I don’t agree that Trump is a racist because he had no history of racism in all of the public dealings he had that were all well-vetted by the MSM. Has he said dumb things? Yep. Not even going to argue with you there. But, HRC looked up to Senator Byrd as her mentor, and he was in the KKK and sought to defeat the Civil Rights Act in 1964. So, we can sit and parse stuff all we want. We can go back and forth all day on who was worse. But what I am not agreeing upon is that because I voted one way or the other, that I support that person 100% in every view they have. That’s just small-minded.

@ak3647 This is going to have to be my last post (I have work to do!) but again, I disagree with you about the economy under Obama. There are 90 million people out of the workforce. The 5% number isn’t an actual accounting of the unemployed in the US, just the number who are for accounting purposes receiving unemployment benefits and are still “in the work force”. Once a person exhausts their benefits they are not accounted for the the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I see people on food stamps are 60 million. I see home ownership down and housing starts down. I see apartment occupancy is up. I see that there are more than 10 million more employees in the government than are in manufacturing. Wages are at their lowest in 20 plus years. Obama “saved the US auto industry” by bailing out GM, who took the handout and sent many of it’s plants to Mexico (because free-trade is so great!).

Besides the increase in taxes that has harmed the business (again, we are a medical provider with fix costs coming in, so we just can’t raise the price of a widget and pass it on to our customers) Obamacare has killed our insurance policy. In the last two years, our insurance premiums for a SINGLE person went from $250 to over $1,000. We had to raise the deductible to $4k when before it was $500. Many of our employees are low-skilled wage earners and can’t afford insurance through our company anymore because we couldn’t afford to make up the difference for them. Many had to be put on part-time work so they didn’t We went from having a great network to a pitiful HMO policy. We had to cut all of our other benefits. It’s been awful for our employees, but we can’t raise the rates on our customers. Meanwhile, all of our third party vendors who sell some type of “widgets” need to raise their prices and we are stuck in the middle. We’ve done everything we can possibly do to reduce overhead, provide the care we need, and still manage to make our bank covenants from year to year.

@DarthBile, you didn’t really answer the question. I asked you where your line is. If you can rationalize a candidate openly promising to weaken the 1st Amendment, whether through a Muslim registry or by making it easier to sue people who write unfavorable things about you, what can’t you rationalize? How much are you willing to compromise on? Where, personally, is your line? Because my line was about 1000 terrible things promised, said, and done ago.

There’s a far cry between “We need a list of Muslims coming into the country” and “We need to vet immigrants.” Though, in typical Trump fashion, he hasn’t explained what is wrong with the existing vetting and how he’d fix it, beyond his Muslim registry.

Darth bile looks deeper into the Donald’s message past the sound bites and it’s just good sound foreign policy. The logical leaps and willful ignorance is astounding here. Should have stopped paying attention as soon as mainstream media was invoked.

@ColeND28 I have more faith in the Constitution than you do, I guess. I know there’s not one person that can weaken or erode the tenets of the First Amendment. You think he’s going to amend the Constitution? You know what that takes, right? There’s no way on earth. We’ve been down that road with the Alien and Sedition Acts, so no one gets to throw away our rights because their feelings are hurt. If he wants to spend his time in office suing people, then it’s going to be a very short 4 years until the next viable Democratic candidate comes to the forefront.

Regarding “lines”? Dude, ask me a specific question and I will try and answer it. To try an quantify like some calculus equation my voting preference and explain it to you? I just don’t have it in me to do. I think you see my point of view and where I come from.

Ok, let’s be specific. You’ve spent a lot of words explaining why you’re able to look past the terrible shit Trump has said, while taking him at his word for the good stuff he’s said.

So, for you, let’s say Hypothetical Candidate X promises you that you can go back to the Bush era economic policies and the old healthcare system. Since these are your most important issues, what would that person have to say in other less personally important areas of governing for you to say “that’s too much?”

I’m having trouble grasping at your points, not because I don’t understand where you’re coming from (I’m from Rural Wisconsin, so I get it), but because my personal bar for acceptable behavior for the man that is going to be the face of America to the world was crossed about 3000 lawsuits ago. So I guess I’m asking you to explain at which point economic policy is no longer enough. Maybe there isn’t one, for you. Lord knows there are lots of single issue voters that decide on shit way less important than economics.

I hope I’m not coming off too condescending (though it’s hard because as a person with cerebral palsy, I find voting for Trump to be personally insulting). I’m really trying to understand why a vague platitude with now real policy specifics overcomes saying lots of really bad things.

I own my business. And it’s flourished under obama. Does that make him the greatest president ever? Not at all. But he’s far from the worst because of health care premiums. We’ve done a lot worse and we just elected someone who has done more bad than any other president in history and he’s not even in office yet.

I would like to also know what it would take to get someone to vote against him. He pretty much did everything imaginable wrong.

@LowEndTheory There were several actually. Reverend Wright (“God Damn America!”) and Bill Ayers (the Weather Underground leader that had bombed police stations, the Capitol and the Pentagon) are a couple of examples.

I just looked up Bill Ayers on Wikipedia and I found this little nugget: In an op-ed piece after the election, Ayers denied any close association with Obama, and criticized the Republican campaign for its use of guilt by association tactics.

She is, but she “identifies” as white, recognizing only the half of her that is actually Caucuasian…Racists love that kind of thinking because it reinforces their theory that white is truly superior. As for actually being a part of the Aryan nation, every team needs a mascot

Here’s the problem with Trump supporters saying that this is just a small number of extremists that don’t reflect all Trump supporters: Bannon, who Trump named as his chief strategist, ran Breitbart, which boasted about being a sounding board for the Alt-Right. This guy Richard B. Spencer CREATED the Alt-Right. So here is the Alt-R openly admitting they are white supremacists, while one of the number one advocates of their cause is going to working for Trump in the white house. There is a direct link there which simply cannot be denied.

Counterpoint though (and I can’t say I know enough about this Alt-Right crowd and I should), I’m a Christian. I believe in many of the teachings in the New Testament and I try to live as clean as life as I can, though I know I am far from perfect. There’s always work to do on the self.

The Westboro Baptist crowd also professes themselves to be Christians. There’s like 30 in a room and all they do is foment hatred and contempt wherever they go. They protest funerals of our service people. So, is there a difference, or am I just as awful as they are because we profess we believe in Jesus Christ?

If that’s the case, then all Muslims are terrorists, correct? Because there’s several thousand of people with a belief in Islam that murder “non-believers” and they can recite passages from the Koran to say that’s justified.

If you’re an atheist, that’s great. It’s your choice to believe or not believe in a higher power. Mao was also an atheist, and he’s responsible for more deaths than Hitler or Stalin. You must be an awful person, too.

You see where this goes? It never ends. Because people have a common point of belief doesn’t mean they share the same ideology. We all want to lump everyone in a big ball of puss and categorize them into something awful to make ourselves feel better. We’ve organized ourselves into tribes from the creation of man for self-preservation, so I guess in some way we are only doing what are instincts have instructed us. But damn, it sure isn’t getting us anywhere now.

@DarthBile If you were in a position of power and as a Christian decided to hire someone from the Westboro Baptist church into another position of power, then I would argue that people are free to lump in your beliefs with there’s. This isn’t just a plausible deniability scenario anymore with the hiring of Bannon. How can you not see that?

Except the guy giving the pro white supremacy speech is the CREATOR of the alt-r. This isn’t some follower taking it to the extreme. This would be as if the pope was preaching the same stuff Westboro does. Big difference when it’s the leader of the movement putting out this message.